- Gershenfeld, Neil.
Fab.
New York: Basic Books, 2005.
ISBN 0-465-02745-8.
-
Once, every decade or so, you encounter a book which empowers
you in ways you never imagined before you opened it, and
ultimately changes your life. This is one of those books.
I am who I am (not to sound too much like Popeye) largely
because in the fall of 1967 I happened to read Daniel McCracken's
FORTRAN book and realised that there was
nothing complicated at all about programming computers—it was a
vocational skill that anybody could learn, much like
operating a machine tool. (Of course, as you get deeper into the
craft, you discover there is a great body of theory to master, but
there's much you can accomplish if you're willing to work hard and
learn on the job before you tackle the more abstract aspects of the
art.) But this was not only something that I could do but,
more importantly, I could learn by doing—and that's how I decided
to spend the rest of my professional life and I've never regretted having
done so. I've never met a genuinely creative person who wished to
spend a nanosecond in a classroom downloading received wisdom at
dial-up modem bandwidth. In fact, I suspect the absence of such
people in the general population is due to the pernicious effects
of the Bismarck worker-bee indoctrination to which the youth of most
“developed” societies are subjected today.
We all know that, some day, society will pass through the nanotechnological
singularity, after which we'll be
eternally free,
eternally young,
immortal, and incalculably rich: hey—works for me! But few
people realise that if
the age of globalised mass production is analogous to that of
mainframe computers
and if the
desktop
nano-fabricator is
equivalent to today's personal supercomputer, we're already
in the equivalent of the minicomputer age of personal fabrication.
Remember minicomputers? Not too large, not too small, and hence difficult
to classify: too expensive for most people to buy, but within the
budget of groups far smaller than the governments and large
businesses who could afford mainframes.
The minicomputer age of personal fabrication is as messy as the
architecture of minicomputers of four decades before: there are lots
of different approaches, standards, interfaces, all mutually
incompatible: isn't innovation wonderful? Well, in this sense
no!
But it's here, now. For a sum in the tens of
thousands of U.S. dollars, it is now possible to equip a
“Fab Lab” which can make “almost anything”.
Such a lab can fit into a modestly sized room, and, provided with
electrical power and an Internet connection, can empower whoever
crosses its threshold to create whatever their imagination can
conceive. In just a few minutes, their dream can become
tangible hardware in the real world.
The personal computer revolution empowered almost anybody (at least
in the developed world) to create whatever information processing
technology their minds could imagine, on their own, or in collaboration
with others. The Internet expanded the scope of this collaboration
and connectivity around the globe: people who have never met one another
are now working together to create software which will be used by
people who have never met the authors to everybody's mutual benefit. Well,
software is cool, but imagine if this extended to stuff. That's
what Fab is about. SourceForge
currently hosts more than 135,500 software development projects—imagine
what will happen when StuffForge.net (the name is still available, as I
type this sentence!) hosts millions of OpenStuff things you can
download to your local Fab Lab, make, and incorporate
into inventions of your own imagination. This is the grand roll-back of
the industrial revolution, the negation of globalisation: individuals,
all around the world, creating for themselves products tailored to their
own personal needs and those of their communities, drawing upon the freely
shared wisdom and experience of their peers around the globe. What a beautiful
world it will be!
Cynics will say, “Sure, it can work at MIT—you have one of the most
talented student bodies on the planet, supported by a faculty which excels in
almost every discipline, and an industrial plant with bleeding edge fabrication
technologies of all kinds.” Well, yes, it works there. But the most inspirational
thing about this book is that it seems to work everywhere: not just at MIT
but also in South Boston, rural India, Norway far north of the Arctic Circle,
Ghana, and Costa Rica—build it and they will make. At times the
author seems unduly amazed that folks without formal education and the advantages
of a student at MIT can imagine, design, fabricate, and apply a solution to
a problem in their own lives. But we're human beings—tool-making
primates who've prospered by figuring things out and finding ways to make
our lives easier by building tools. Is it so surprising that putting the
most modern tools into the hands of people who daily confront the most
fundamental problems of existence (access to clean water, food, energy, and
information) will yield innovations which surprise even professors at
MIT?
This book is so great, and so inspiring, that I will give the author a
pass on his clueless attack on AutoCAD's (never attributed) DXF file
format on pp. 46–47, noting simply that the answer to why
it's called “DXF” is that Lotus had already used
“DIF” for their spreadsheet interchange files and
we didn't want to create confusion with their file format, and that
the reason there's more than one code for an X co-ordinate is that
many geometrical objects require more than one X co-ordinate to define them
(well, duh).
The author also totally gets what I've been talking about
since Unicard and
even before that as “Gizmos”, that
every single device in the world, and every button on every
device will eventually have its own (IPv6) Internet address and be
able to interact with every other such object in every way that makes
sense. I envisioned MIDI networks as the cheapest way to implement
this bottom-feeder light-switch to light-bulb network; the author,
a decade later, opts for a PCM “Internet 0”—works for
me. The medium doesn't matter; it's that the message makes it end
to end so cheaply that you can ignore the cost of the interconnection
that ultimately matters.
The author closes the book with the invitation:
Finally, demand for fab labs as a research project, as a collection
of capabilities, as a network of facilities, and even as a technological
empowerment movement is growing beyond what can be handled by
the initial collection of people and institutional partners that were
involved in launching them. I/we welcome your thoughts on, and
participation in, shaping their future operational, organizational, and
technological form.
Well, I am but a
humble
programmer, but here's how I'd go about it. First of all, I'd create a
“Fabrication Trailer“ which could visit every community in the
United States, Canada, and Mexico; I'd send it out on the road in every
MIT vacation season to preach the evangel of “make” to every
community it visited. In, say, one of eighty of such communities, one would find
a person who dreamed of this happening in his or her lifetime who was empowered by
seeing it happen; provide them a template which, by writing a cheque, can
replicate the fab and watch it spread. And as it spreads, and creates
wealth, it will spawn other Fab Labs.
Then, after it's perfected in a couple of hundred North American
copies, design a Fab Lab that fits into an ocean cargo container and
can be shipped anywhere. If there isn't electricity and Internet
connectivity, also deliver the diesel generator or solar panels and
satellite dish. Drop these into places where they're most needed,
along with a wonk who can bootstrap the locals into doing things with
these tools which astound even those who created them. Humans are
clever, tool-making primates; give us the tools to realise what we
imagine and then stand back and watch what happens!
The legacy media bombard us with conflict, murder, and mayhem. But the
future is about creation and construction. What does
An Army of
Davids do when they turn their creativity and ingenuity toward
creating solutions to problems perceived and addressed by individuals?
Why, they'll call it a renaissance! And that's exactly what it will be.
For more information, visit the Web site of
The Center for Bits and Atoms
at MIT, which the author directs. Fab
Central provides links to Fab Labs around the world, the
machines they use, and the
open source software
tools you can download and start using today.
December 2006 